The invention relates generally to the field of furniture and more specifically to light-weight chairs and chair frames having independent seats and backs.
In recent years, in furniture design it has become desirable to provide furniture having both great comfort and distinctive styling and design. With chairs, it is difficult to combine comfort, flexibility, and distinctive styling, where comfort is often dependent upon the resilience of the individual members forming the structure therof, and simultaneously requiring the chair to be sturdy enough to withstand years of use. Often comfort and styling has required the chair to be heavy and bulky, with thick padding and a large sturdy frame. These structures usually have relatively rigid frames, relying on padded seats and backs for comfort, and are also costly to manufacture and purchase and tiring to move because of their great weight and bulk.
Heretofore, light-weight moderately-priced chairs have been constructed of metal tubing bent into a frame over which fabric or other seat material is placed. The frame has had to either be of sufficient rigidity to withstand the every-day stresses inherent in use, and therefore must be relatively rigid, or it would be too resilient, resulting in a chair having too short a lifetime. Furthermore, since the light-weight chair frames are usually of one or at most a few bent metal members, the structure would have the same torsional rigidity throughout for both the seat and the back. Light-weight chairs provided in the prior art have also suffered because of the difficulty of repairing them without replacing the entire chair.